Locker Seventeen

Vincent picked up the key. The brass was warm from Elena's coat pocket.

"Which locker?"

"My dad said there was a row behind the old stands. I only ever saw the front of the building from the ice."

"The west bleachers. They closed that row when they redid the seats." Vincent had signed the approval from a restaurant in Midtown. He couldn't have named one thing the contractor had left behind. "Did Luis tell you what I'd find?"

"He said I'd know when to bring you the key. I spent years hoping I wouldn't."

A knock sounded against the doorframe. Marco stood there with his tablet tucked under one arm. He'd left his radio downstairs with the guard outside Sophie's lounge. Vincent knew that because Elena had asked him to leave it there, so she'd be able to hear if Sophie called for her.

"The police took the man and his bag," Marco said. "They let me photograph the badge. There's something else you need to see before they clear out."

He set the tablet down. A camera over the west service corridor showed an empty stretch of concrete and the back of a stack of folded skating mats. At the edge of the image a man in a blue work shirt appeared, pulled the mats forward, and ducked behind them.

"Danny," Elena said.

"Two minutes ago," Marco said. He tapped the screen to bring up a second angle.

Danny stood in front of a waist-high locker with the door open. A ring of maintenance keys dangled from the lock. He lifted a long metal case out with both hands.

The locker door swung far enough for Vincent to read the number.

Seventeen.

"Send somebody to the west exit," Marco said, reaching for his phone.

"Wait." Vincent watched Danny drag the mats back into place. "Did you see him put up the sign or let the other man in?"

"No. But he waited until the police were in the lobby to take that case."

Vincent knew how quickly a room full of his people could reach a conclusion if he said a man's name in the wrong tone. He looked at Elena. She'd gone very still. Behind her, through the office glass, he could see Sophie on the other side of the lobby holding a cup in both hands while Nina bent to listen to her.

"Call Danny first," Vincent said. "He knows you. Ask him to come upstairs."

Marco went out into the hall. Elena held a photograph out to Vincent. It had been folded around something once. He could see a white crease along the edge.

In the picture she was seventeen and standing outside the harbor shop in the red scarf he remembered. Luis Reyes had one hand braced on the doorway. The sign above them showed a broken skate blade, a little joke Luis used to make about opening a repair shop when the city was full of people who'd rather throw things out.

"Turn it over," she said.

Along the back, near the fold, Luis had written a date. It was the date of Carlo's death. Under it were two words in a different hand.

WEST STANDS.

Vincent recognized the handwriting from the notes his father used to leave on the kitchen counter, usually about something he could just as easily have said aloud. *Take a scarf. Your mother would have made you.*

"Carlo wrote that," he said.

Elena nodded. "Dad slipped the picture into my coat pocket with the key. He said Carlo wanted you to have it when you could get in and out without your family knowing where you'd been."

Marco came back in. "Danny's not picking up. The west exit just opened."

Vincent got to his feet. For a second he wanted to tell Marco to send every man he had after Danny. Then he thought of Danny at a fundraiser last winter, sitting on the rubber floor and fixing a broken buckle for a boy who'd been too embarrassed to tell his father. He'd let the boy hold the screws. Vincent had watched it happen from the other side of the glass.

"Leave him a message. Tell him I want to hear what happened from him. Put my number in it."

Marco held his gaze for a beat. Then he began to type.

Elena tucked the photograph into her coat pocket. "I'm coming with you."

He'd been about to suggest she stay with Sophie. She waited long enough for him to hear the suggestion in his own silence.

"I know what my father's mark looks like when he puts it somewhere he wants me to find," she said. "You may need me."

"Come with me," Vincent said.

She stopped downstairs to tell Sophie where they were going. Vincent could hear the girl ask if he'd be back before her cocoa got cold.

"He might be a little longer," Elena told her. "I promise I'll come and find you as soon as we're done."

Sophie thought about that. "I can save him a marshmallow."

Vincent let Elena go ahead of him into the service hall. The bulb over the west stairs had burned out. At the landing she caught his sleeve, and he stopped beside her.

"That way goes under the seats," she said. "If you're trying to find anything Luis Reyes had a hand in, look at it from where a man would be working."

She crouched where the wall met the end of the locker row. From that angle, a broken blade had been scratched into the paint along the bottom of number seventeen. A thumbprint of dust lay across one end of it.

The door was shut. Vincent could see the shine on the latch where Danny had handled it. He turned the key. Inside, the dust held the clean outline of a case.

"He's got it," Vincent said.

Elena put her hand into the locker and felt along the underside of the top shelf. "Dad used to keep the shop's spare cash up here. He thought every thief in New York was over six feet tall and too proud to bend down."

Her fingers caught on a strip of cloth. She pulled out a small canvas pouch.

Inside was a voice recorder and a slip of paper folded down to the size of a matchbook. Vincent unfolded it against the locker door. Four words stood in Carlo's handwriting.

FOR VINCENT. THE TERMINAL.

The official report had never mentioned a meeting at the ferry terminal. It had said his father's car caught fire near the waterfront, probably as a result of a mechanical failure. For six years, Vincent had read every account anyone could put in front of him. He had never once heard his father explain why he'd been there.

Elena took the key so Vincent could hold the recorder with both hands.

He pressed play.